Saturday, 19 May 2012

There's a Paul Williams documentary called Still Alive which has just come out in the States. Rumer has recorded his Travellin' Boy on her new album. So it seems a good time to take a look at his first solo album, Someday Man, a personal touchstone. I talked to Paul about it in 2001. Here's what he had to say.

"Some people always complain that their life is too short, so they hurry it alongTheir worries drive them insane but they still go along for the rideAs for me, I have all the time in the world..."

It's early 1970, and Paul Williams and Roger Nichols have been writing a few songs together. Great songs, too, that saw them shaping up as a Goffin and King for listeners who had hung around soda fountains listening to Bobby Vee in their early teens. For Up On The Roof, there was Harper's Bizarre's The Drifter; for Oh No Not My Baby, read To Put Up With You by The American Breed. But while there was plenty of work rolling in, notching up hits was a different matter.

"We were just about convinced that we'd never have a smash single. We almost sank The Monkees with Someday Man - Listen To The Band on the B-side got more airplay." The release of Paul's debut album, then, was never likely to test the noblesse of that opening lyric. By the end of the following year, the Nichols/Williams team was America's most in-demand.

Nichols was from Missoula, Montana, a city at the convergence of five mountain ranges, spreading down the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers. In 1968 he released an album as evocative as his rural roots with brother and sister Melinda and Murray MacLeod. Roger Nichols And The Small Circle Of Friends came out on A&M with help from the cream of the West Coast - it was produced by Tommy LiPuma, engineered by Bruce Botnick, with Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks in attendance. Nichols' lyricist was Tony Asher, and in many ways Small Circle is a lyrical sequel to Pet Sounds - a little older, a little wiser, an album for early twenty-somethings thinking of settling down, but still turning to Smokey Robinson songs for relationship advice.

The album didn't do too well (though it did sell 50,000 copies when it was re-issued in Japan in the nineties, encouraging a belated sequel), but A&M owner Herb Alpert was impressed enough to get Nichols a staff job as a songwriter for A&M publishing, which is where he was introduced to Paul Williams.

Paul Williams had a peripatetic childhood, born in Omaha, Nebraska, but constantly moving, changing schools (nine by the time he reached the ninth grade), thanks to his father's job in construction. Then his father was killed in a car crash and Paul was shipped off to live with an aunt and uncle. He quit singing in talent shows and became more interested in film and acting, actively pursuing a movie career when he reached 21.

Soon he was acting alongside John Gielgud and Rod Steiger in Tony Richardson's The Loved One. "I was suddenly living my dream, 23-years old playing a 13-year-old squeaky voiced genius." His looks - part cherub, part Jim Henson creation - meant he was made for character parts, usually a good deal younger than his real age. In The Chase (1965) he taunts Robert Redford with a snippet of one of his own tunes - which inspired Paul to write, if only for his own amusement. A few months later he unsuccessfully auditioned for The Monkees. Acting work was drying up, and a short-lived publishing deal with Ishmael Music, part of White Whale, ended after three months with Paul being told he had no future in music.

A chance meeting in 1967 with songwriter Biff Rose was the catalyst. Together they wrote Fill Your Heart, recorded by Tiny Tim and later David Bowie; they also got a publishing deal with A&M, whose head of publishing, Chuck Kaye, teamed Paul up with writer/arranger Roger Nichols. Paul recorded one patchy but worthwhile LP on Reprise with a short-lived group called The Holy Mackerel (with pre-Elvis Jerry Scheff on bass), which was released in '69 after they'd already split. It included a moody soft-psych track called Scorpio Red, as well as one bona fide classic, Bitter Honey, an ultra catchy co-write with Roger Nichols which presaged the uplifting melancholia that was to become their trademark. "Roger is the best thing that ever happened to me as a songwriter. I learned more about structure, discipline, quality and class from Roger Nichols than anyone I ever met. He made me feel like I was a real lyricist."

Owing Reprise one more album, Paul recorded Someday Man in '69 with Roger producing. The pair had already released a legendary publishers album, We've Only Just Begun, that was a beauty in its own right. On Someday Man, Williams' warm, intense vocals - like a reedier Gene Clark, with a similar emotional tug - are a perfect match for Nichols' soft magic: there's the baroque Americana of I Know You, and the incredible switches on Roan Pony from urban paranoia to panoramic dreamscape. Oboes and harps figure strongly. "It was really Roger's album," Paul modestly reckons, "he did everything, charts, player choices. I wasn't an artist yet, not as much as I would become in a few more years I think."

Yet the spirit of Someday Man is more in Paul's lyrics than anything, the generosity, humility and humanity. Truth and beauty. Really, it's a whole philosophy: "I wrote from my heart more than I realised." The Monkees' cover of the title song probably makes it the most familiar track. "Is it about me? I'm not sure. I think so. It's a song about trusting."

The critics' indifference to the record hardly seemed to matter as the Carpenters' recordings of the Nichols/Williams canon - starting with We've Only Just Begun - sent their publishing cheques into the stratosphere. The former was originally written for a bank, a jingle
commissioned after one of the bank's executives heard Nichols'
Small Circle of Friends album. It was written the day before
the ad company's deadline. Then Richard Carpenter saw the ad, the Carpenters cut their version, it reached no.2 in the States, and was nominated for a Grammy. A swathe of classics followed: I Won't Last A Day Without You, Rainy Days And Mondays, Let Me Be The One. By 1973, Nichols and Williams had "gone our separate ways after several years of day-to-day contact. I was off chasing movie dreams. I had a huge ego and a performing career ahead of me and I was using and drinking so my perception may have been altered."

Bugsy Malone and Phantom Of The Paradise, plus a string of Radio 2 staples like An Old Fashioned Love Song, followed but somehow the magic and innocence of Someday Man wasn't to be repeated. "The sweet surprise is finding out that there are people around the world who really honour the work, really cherish the album. Me and Roger have been collaborating a bit, we both think we've got one more really good song in the partnership. You never know."

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

Brian Matthew was there at the birth of British Rock'n'roll,
presenting Saturday
Club on the BBC's Light Programme. In the sixties he introduced the
Beatles to millions of BBC radio listeners, and even toured with them in the States. Today, Brian Matthew
still presents a
show in the same slot - he has been the host of Sounds Of The Sixties
since 1990, and has the highest listening
figures of any Radio 2 Saturday show, not bad when you consider the
octogenarian is up against the high-profile likes of Graham Norton and
Dermot
O'Leary. Over tea and sandwiches at his home in Kent, he told me that he
trained at RADA and had always planned to end up a TV producer.

Bob Stanley: You didn't initially want to be a DJ?
Brian Matthew: Not at all. I did forces radio in the
army for a year, in Hamburg. It was all BBC equipment. We were based in
what had been an old opera house, and lived in a hotel. The guys in
charge there included Cliff Michelmore who was head of variety, and Raymond
Baxter who was head of the announcing department. He'd not long been out
of the RAF, a terribly hoo-ray chap. When he first met me he said 'There's
only two things to remember - don't go on air drunk, and don't swear.' I
thought crikey, what sort of set-up is this? Of course I broke all the
rules. Not intentionally.

BS: I've read that you were at Hilversum too, which is a name I know from my parents' old radiogram, but I still don't really know where it is.
BM: After Hamburg I was at RADA, then I went straight into the Old
Vic which is where I met Pamela (his wife - they married in 1951), and someone who worked for
Hilversum, in the English department of Dutch radio. He gave me his
number. When work was thin on the ground I called and he said 'Please
go along to HMV on Oxford Street and record an audition, we want you to
read some news. HMV will send us the disc, we've got an arrangement with
them'. So I did, and we lived there, in Hilversum for two years. It was
the centre for all Dutch radio. It was a funny old set-up, short wave
radio, short wave only, and we broadcast the same 40 minute transmission
three times a day to different areas - America, the far east.
Dutch
radio was split up by five main companies, either religious or run by
newspapers. So in effect you had a catholic station, a Conservative
station, a Labour one, and a non-conformist one... I don't know what the
fifth was. And they all had their own buildings around Hilversum. We
had our own set-up in an old house, quite near to the others but not
connected. Offices in one house, studios in another. We were there
during the time of the enormous flood in 1953, large areas in a terrible
state, loads of people killed. The American army came in. They
gradually rebuilt the dykes, and came the time they were going to fill
in the last block, it was quite a historic event. I was covering it so
I learned everything I could about how it had been done. Needless to say I was repeating myself, but
they put a copy of the recording in their archives.

BS: What happened between Hilversum and your first job at the BBC in 1955?
BM: We came back
and lived with my parents in Coventry. I tried to get work at the
Jaguar factory - they kept me hanging on, until one day I noticed there
was a dairy across the road, advertising for work. So I was a milkman
for six months. I used to go round in a lorry and collect milk from the
farms. Then I worked in the dairy doing all the pasteurising, stacking
up the next day's delivery in bottles and crates. It was pretty horrid.

While
I was there I wrote to the BBC and asked if I could do a programme on
Dutch jazz - they had a programme called World Of Jazz - and they said
yes. The people in the dairy were very impressed, they said 'bloody
hell, we've got a star working with us now!' and all that rubbish. The
producer - who left under a bit of a cloud, but that's another story -
he liked it and asked me to do a programme on English traditional jazz.
Within weeks I got an offer from Dunlop to edit their works magazine, in
Kenilworth, which is not a bad place to live I must admit. And the BBC
offered me a job as a trainee announcer, so I thought I'd go for that.

We found a flat in Willesden, quite a large flat, and lived there for a
couple of years on the princely salary of less than £20 a week. They
put me straight on to announcing, on all services - in those days it
was Home Service, Light Programme and Third Programme. You were usually
associated with one of them, but I did everything, I went from one to
another quite happily. Read the news, I did prom concerts...I always
liked the light music, big band jazz and that sort of thing. Johnny
Dankworth had a short series, only four programmes, with a huge
orchestra, a 27 piece band. Every week he had a guest classical
musician in the band, a viola player or whatever, and each week he'd
write a piece featuring this soloist. I did those with Johnny and we
became good friends. So I did three years an announcer, then I
thought I'd like to be a producer - I thought it might be a way in to
television, as a director.

BS: You produced Saturday Club, starting in 1957. How did you end up presenting it?
BM: Jimmy Grant was their principal jazz
producer. He was briefed to launch a programme called Skiffle Club which
he asked me to introduce. I said I don't even know what skiffle is, he
said that's alright, we'll manage. And it was an unbelievable runaway
success, getting enormous listening figures. Management thought 'ullo,
and asked Jim to do a two hour programme that would include skiffle but
also has other elements of all this pop music that's emerging.

We had a
traditional jazz band and a modern jazz group as well. We ended up with
five groups a week that we recorded ourselves, and one live in the
studio on Saturday morning. We were very severely restricted on playing
records, what they called 'needle time', which I've never really
understood. Basically it was an agreement between the BBC and the record
companies that you would severely restrict the number of records in
order that you could continue to employ live musicians. And of course,
that's how the pirates shot from below everybody's feet and broke
all the rules by playing records all the time. And the BBC very soon
followed, thank goodness.

Anyway, I started
Saturday Club and the Sunday morning programme Easybeat (from 1958), and they said
'we'd like you to start presenting these programmes as well as producing
them.' I thought 'Wow, whoopee!', and after six years of that I got an
offer to go on commercial radio as well, on Luxembourg, and went
freelance. I can't believe the amount of work I was getting through. The
BBC said we'd like you to carry on doing what you're doing. So
eventually I was doing eight programmes a week on Luxembourg, Sundays I
went up to Birmingham and televised Thank Your Lucky Stars (from 1961 to 1965), and produced
a World Service programme. I was never at home, ever.

BS: Most of your radio work was on the Light Programme. What happened when it split into Radios 1 and 2 in 1967?
BM: I did Saturday Club for eight or nine
years, until somebody in management - now dead, I'm happy to say in this
instance - decided they were going to unite people with Radio 1, and
that I wasn't really suited for that. So they cast me out. I went to see
this chap and I said 'Are you really telling me I have no future in
radio?' and he said 'Well yes, I think I am'. Fortunately an engineer
I'd worked with on Saturday Club named Brian Willey had started to
introduce a daily afternoon programme called Roundabout, with a
different compere every day of the week. Brian gradually increased it
until I was working five days a week, the only one there. It was what
they now call drive time, 4.30 til 7. And I've not really been out of
work since.

BS: The first time I remember hearing your voice was on My Top Twelve. Have you ever been on Desert Island Discs?
BM: Never. It's absolutely crackers! It never came up.

BS: That is crackers. So how did you end up presenting My Top Twelve?
BM: That
was a surprise. Derek Chinnery was head of Radio 1. Out of the blue (in 1973) he
came up with the idea, it was a good idea. Once in a while, someone
would surprise me and choose all their own records! It was a weird
eye-opener. I remember a My Top Twelve that I did do with Bill Haley. We
were chatting about his whole life story. He admitted he'd had a
serious drink problem, and that it had interfered with his work. Then
suddenly he broke into tears in the interview, sobbing, because he'd
made a mess of his life. We got it sorted out, that didn't go on air, but it
was quite moving. He wasn't being sour grapes or anything, no reason why
he should, but clearly thought he'd fouled it up. Which he had, to a
large extent.

BS: I've heard that you found Nina Simone a bit of a handful.
BM: I interviewed her two or three times - this wasn't on My Top Twelve, though. The last time
was an absolute disaster. I was a great admirer of her work, saw her at
Ronnie's (Ronnie Scott's) and thought she was really great. She was always a bit tight.
She got a bit quirky and peculiar because she felt, with a great deal of
justification, that she'd been mistreated, mainly by record companies.
So she had a great chip on her shoulder. We had her on Round Midnight
and Robin the producer was devoted to her, he was thrilled to be
meeting her. She came up from Ronnie's with a crowd - I think they were
related to her, at least some of them were. He went up to her and said
'Delighted to meet you Miss Simone, may I call you Nina?' And she said
'No! You may not!'. I thought wow, we're off to a flying start here! She
sat with her crowd in the control room and eventually one of these guys
came in and said 'I want you to tell me the questions you're going to
ask Miss Simone'. I said 'I'm not going to tell you. That's down to
me, not down to you, I'm sorry we don't work like that'. And he looked a
bit put out. So he went back and told her, there was a bit of a
hoo-ha... She came in in a very, very black mood and gave me a rich two
and a half minutes, it wasn't much, and then said she had to go back to
Ronnie's. I said, fair enough. Robin rang and he booked a cab, and we all
stood on the steps outside with nothing to say to each other, not too
pleased with each other. I remember Robin was holding the cab door open
for them and said 'Thank you very much Miss Simone. Fuck off" and
slammed the door. I thought good for you, man! I never met her again,
I'm happy to say. We were only promoting her appearance at the club.
Dear God!

BS: Were any other guests that awkward?
BM: I didn't get to meet many people who pulled that angle, with high
blown ideas of their own importance. It was a weird eye opener. I was
booked to do a
session with Brook Benton. Radio was quite different where he came from.
He asked 'who's gonna put this out on disc?' - he really thought we
were ripping him off, and he wasted half the session arguing about
whether he was going to sing. He gave me a really hard time, but he came
out with five songs in the end. Gene Vincent, he was alright, but he
came in
on Saturday Club swinging a knife and frightened me to death. This
dagger he'd bought in Africa. It was just a thing he did, he didn't make
any threatening gestures. But I was a bit put out.

BS: One of the better known Saturday Club sessions was with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Where would that have been recorded?
BM: Piccadilly Theatre, round the back
of a gentleman's outfitter. Vincent was first, then Cochran came in to
do his session, who I must say was a thoroughly nice guy. Vincent got up
to leave and Cochran shouted 'Hey Vincent, you ain't goin' anywhere. I
got your crutches! You come and jam with me'. They did a twenty minute
jam which was fabulous, at the end of which our recording engineer
came out of his little booth and said 'was I supposed to record that?'
Can you imagine? Twenty joyous minutes.

BS: During the Saturday Club years, did you think of yourself as a Beatles man or a Stones man?
BM: I
thought very much I was on the Beatles side of the coin. But now I
prefer playing Stones records. Although I found them much more difficult
to get on with. Mick would always do a promotional chat, but he would
not be very forthcoming. I found out after he died that Brian Jones was
quite a fan. I had a nice letter from one of his family saying he had
always spoken highly of me and I was totally surprised, because I never
got them impression from meeting him. He was always very cagey. Keith I
never got on with at all. I admire what he's done, quite substantially,
but he was almost impossible for me to deal with. They were a closed
shop, very inward looking.

BS: How well did you get on with the Beatles? Didn't you accompany them on an American tour?
BM: The Beatles were very extrovert - my
only regret there is that I didn't have more to do with George who I
thought was a lovely guy, absolutely lovely. I went to America with them
for a week at Epstein's invitation and they were all pretty good. I
never knew where I was with Lennon! Who did? But Paul was always very
forthcoming. And I had one long conversation with George in a dressing
room in Chicago, and I thought this guy's got a lot more than he's
allowed to say. I don't mean not allowed but... the kind of general
attitude was John and Paul did all the chat, and Ringo would make the
odd comment from the background - he was always all right. But George.
I've just seen the documentary his wife made, and I've been practically
in tears thinking 'what an opportunity I missed there'. Only because he
was obviously somebody that you really ought to know. Extremely talented
too. Well, they all were! I'll make an exception for Ringo, he didn't
pretend to be particularly talented.

BS: I've read that you and Brian Epstein were set to open a theatre together. What happened?
BM: I knew Brian Epstein
very well - only through the Beatles. I met him when they first came to
Broadcasting House, and we became extremely good friends. I dreamed up
the idea of building a theatre in this area (Orpington, Kent) and the
council agreed. They gave me a potential site at a place called High
Elms, which is a huge woodland estate, and they would charge me a
peppercorn rent. We could have built it for £24,000 - it's unbelievable
now when you think about it. Brian said he'd arrange the raising of the
funds and I'd run it. In the meantime, the theatre in Bromley burnt down
and it was put about that I'd set fire to it. Absolute nonsense! It was
raised in council meetings - I had a friend on the council. They said
'we don't want this Matthew chap building a theatre because we'll have
our new one' - and their new one cost £3 million.

BS: Were you aware of what was going on in Brian Epstein's private life?
BM: I knew he was
gay, but I didn't know he had quite serious problems in that area,
which he had. I didn't know that he was so heavily into drugs, very,
very hooked. And generally his life was a bit of a mess. Then
the Beatles hooked up with that awful man in America, Allen Klein. A pretty
fearsome man. When I was over there Brian said he had a meeting with him
and would I like to come. Well, he had armed guards, literally, in this
room in a baseball stadium. I don't know why, it was just his nature. I
thought 'I don't like this man, he's poison.' Of course Brian didn't
know what to make of it; he thought 'he can do things I can't do', which
was true, unfortunately. Anyway, Klein got in there eventually and
fouled it up for everybody. Poor old Brian. Very sad.

BS: From January 1978 until you took over Sounds Of The Sixties, you presented Round Midnight, which was an arts show.
BM: It
was. That was its basic concept. That ran for thirteen years, 11 til 1,
five nights a week. We did it as an audience show, live, from theatres
all over the country and that was super, I really enjoyed that. We did a book every night, and some sort of entertainment - could be
opera, could be ballet. And of course there was a substantial amount of
music. We went to Edinburgh every year for a fortnight. And we did other
theatres usually when they had a touring show with a big name. We went
to Scarborough, Alan Ayckbourn was very keen. I couldn't believe it -
that was one of the first we did and got an absolute full audience. In
the middle of the night! In Scarborough! They didn't seem surprised,
but I must admit I was.

BS: Forty five years after they said you had no future in broadcasting, what are your thoughts on Radio 1?
BM: I've never had much time for
it, quite honestly. I don't like a lot of the style that's evolved from
it. It obviously had some very good people on it. But they've had some
crap as well.

Brian Matthew presents Sounds Of The Sixties on Radio 2 every Saturday morning between 8 and 10

There are more details on Brian's career at:
http://andywalmsley.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/brian-matthew.html